Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Rob, one of my MartianCraft partners-in-crime, decided to throw in the towel last night on Briefs.app. After a solid year of fighting with Apple's app review team, implementing changes that were suggested might clear the path for getting Briefs.app on the App Store, and trying to just get a straight answer from Apple about what the real problem was, he's finally decided it's just not worth the hassle any more.

There were several lights at the end of the tunnel over the course of the year, each one a bigger and faster freight train. Despite the changes to the license agreement that seemed to imply Apple was going to become more reasonable on this subject, they continued to insist that Briefs allowed users to download and run executable code and is dangerous.

I don't like that answer, but if that was the answer, they should have manned up and told him that a year ago rather than stringing him along, giving him false hope, and enticing him to invest more time he doesn't have on a fruitless endeavor.

This was no way to treat a third party dev, and Rob has been way too nice about the whole damn situation.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Over at TUAW, fellow author Erica Sadun opines that WWDC is broken because it sold out fast. And she's right. It's so horribly broken that more people want to attend than they've got room for. Th… wait, what? Where I come from, that's called "success", and it usually indicates that you're doing something right. It's not usually a big red flag that you need to make a complete about face in your approach.

But that's exactly what Erica is suggesting Apple do.

I used to work in the Enterprise software world and know all about these large conferences that Erica is referencing. I was a developer at PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle), and I've been to (and have even spoken at) mega Enterprise conferences like the old PeopleSoft conferences (20k attendees at its peak) and OracleWorld (which is now, I guess, called Oracle OpenWorld because Oracle is so… open).

Making WWDC more like these giant, soulless, "enterprise" conferences is not the answer. Scaling WWDC to 10k, 20k or 40k is fixing the problem by shooting the golden goose. Trying to scale up WWDC like that would utterly destroy everything that is wonderful about it.

WWDC is community. WWDC is actually being able to talk with the engineers who wrote the software you're having problems using. WWDC is a chance to get on a first name basis with people in our community, including (if you're lucky) some of the awesome people who make the APIs we use to make our living. It's a time for learning, absolutely, but it's also for making friendships, making business connections, and looking for future employees/employers/subcontractors. The current size of WWDC is part of what makes it great and is part of why so many people want to attend. In fact, the past few years, it's bordered on being too big, with lab slots becoming harder to get and many sessions having long lines and being standing room only.

What WWDC is, is not what giant corporate conferences like OracleWorld are. If anything, they're the polar opposite. Which is not to knock what those big conferences are - they serve a particular market, and they serve it well, but we are not their market and our needs cannot be met by adopting their model. Conferences like Oracle World are places where groups of people from the same large company or government entity go together, hang out together, and then leave together. They're places that people go because their employer is paying for them to go and has instructed them to go. They're places where people wander through large convention halls picking up swag they don't really want while being sold on the merits of various products their employers don't really need. They're vendor fair as much as a place to learn. In fact, they're usually more like one big fucking advertisement that your company pays for you to attend.

They are not events (by and large) that people save up and do without in order to attend. They're not events that people make sacrifices in order to find a way to go.

But that's exactly what WWDC is. WWDC is a conference that people want to go to even if they have to pay money out of their own pocket. It's something people look forward to attending and talk about having attended for months afterwards. It's a conference where a great many people pay their own way to attend and are thrilled to do so.

Monstrous mega-conferences don't develop community. That's simply not what they're there for. Forty thousand people isn't a community: It's a city. Forty thousand people is so far beyond anybody's monkeysphere as to make the concept of "community" meaningless. Wandering around conferences like OpenWorld no more engenders a sense of community than does walking through Times Square.

I don't want WWDC to become that. You don't want WWDC to become that. I honestly don't even think Erica really wants WWDC to become that. I think what she wants is a perfectly egalitarian world where everybody gets what they want. But that only exists in fiction. In real life, everything involves tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs with her suggested solution would be disastrous for our community.

Scarcity always increases value. Apple could have chosen to jack up the WWDC ticket price until they stopped selling out, but they didn't do that. In fact, the price hasn't increased in years. Yes, they did get rid of the early-bird pricing and group rates, but the base ticket price for WWDC has remained unchanged for quite some time (8 years maybe? Anyone know?). Apple could gouge us and many of us would pay the inflated price happily. But they don't do that. In fact, they charge us less than the early bird prices at big mega-conferences like Oracle OpenWorld, Tech Ed, and PDC, despite the fact that WWDC has no sponsors or advertisers and no vendor floor.

The simple fact of the matter is that any mechanism that Apple might implement to "level the playing field" for tickets would result in somebody feeling like they didn't get a fair chance to purchase. The more complex the scheme and the more advance notice Apple were to give, the more opportunities there would be for people to game the system and create true inequity in the process.

What Apple did do was put WWDC tickets on sale without advance notice and sold them on a first come, first served basis. That's not perfect, but it is about as close to a level playing field as you can get. Yes, some people were on planes, and some people were sleeping (including people in Silicon Valley, it should be noted), and some just weren't paying attention to the Internet when the tickets went on sale. But those tickets were available for over ten hours and everybody should have known they were going to sell out quickly. Yes, people got left out, and it sucks. That's the nature of scarcity.

This is not an artificial scarcity, however. WWDC tickets are like money, you can't just solve the scarcity by printing more tickets. Every additional ticket reduces the value of the conference to the rest of the attendees. Letting everybody have what they want means nobody gets what they really want, or need.

I'll take scarcity and a once-a-year scramble to buy tickets before they sell out over a soulless commodity conference like OpenWorld any day, thank you.

Today, WWDC was announced. This is the earliest they've announced WWDC during the iPhone epoch, so there's a little more time to prepare than we've had the last few years. Given how popular it's been the past few years, I thought it was worth updating and re-posting my WWDC First Time Guide from last year and the previous year.

Again, WWDC is different every year, so don't take anything written here as gospel, but hopefully these hints and suggestions will help some of you.

Arrive on Sunday or Earlier. Registration is usually open most of the day on Sunday. You really, really want to get your badge and related swag (bag, shirt, jacket, etc) on Sunday. The line for the keynote will start forming many hours before the doors to Moscone West open up on Monday (the past three years, people started lining up before midnight Sunday). If you do not have your badge when you get to Moscone on Monday morning, you will almost certainly end up in an overflow room for the Keynote and may even miss part of it. Even if you don't care about being in the main room, there's still a lot going on on Sunday and it's a good time to meet new people and catch up with old friends. You really don't want to deal with the badge process on Monday.

Do not lose your badge. If you lose it, you are done. You will spend your time crying on the short steps in front of Moscone West while you watch everyone else go in to get schooled. Sure, you'll still be able to attend the unofficial after-hours goings-on (but not the Thursday night party, which is usually a blast), but you'll miss out on the really important stuff. No amount of begging or pleading will get you a replacement badge, and since they're likely to sell out, no amount of money will get you another one, either. And that would suck. Treat it like gold. When I'm not in Moscone West or somewhere else where I need the badge, I put it in my backpack, clipped to my backpack's keyper (the little hook designed to hold your keys so they don't get lost in the bottom of your bag). Yes, there have been isolated stories of people managing to convince a sympathetic conference worker to print them a new badge, but don't expect it, those are exceptions. The employees are not supposed to print new badges, and most won't.

Eat your fill. They will feed you two meals a day; you're on your own for dinner. Breakfast starts a half-hour before the first session, and it's most likely going to be a continental breakfast - fruit, pastries, juice, coffee, donuts, toast, and those round dinner rolls that Californians think are bagels, but really aren't. If you're diabetic, need to eat gluten-free, or are an early riser, you'll probably want to eat before-hand. Lunch used to be (IIRC) a hot lunch, but three or four years ago they switched to boxed lunches. They are pretty good as far as boxed lunches go, but they are boxed lunches. A lot of people complain (loudly) about them and choose to go to a nearby restaurant during the lunch break, which is pretty long - at least 90 minutes.

Party hard (not that you have a choice). There are lots of official and unofficial events in the evening. There's often a CocoaHeads meeting at the Apple Store. It fills up crazy fast, so go early if you go. It's usually competing with several other parties, but it starts earlier than most events and finishes early enough for people to go to other parties when it's done. Best bet is to follow as many iPhone and Mac devs on Twitter that you can - the unofficial gatherings happen at various places downtown, often starting with a few "seed crystal" developers stopping for a drink and tweeting their whereabouts. The unofficial, spontaneous gatherings can be really fun and a great opportunity. The parties often start before WWDC - there are usually a few on Sunday, and there have been ones as early as Saturday before. Pretty much any other bar within stumbling distance of Moscone West will be used for planned and informal gatherings. As we get closer, there will be lists and calendars devoted to all the events and parties. Some are invite-only, but many are first-come, first-serve. Although there's a lot of drinking going on, these are worth attending even if you don't drink. Great people, great conversations... good times.

At some point, one or more lists will pop up to track the official parties, gatherings, meet-ups, and BOF (birds of a feather meetings - meet-ups for people interested in a particular subject).

Take good notes. You are going to be drinking knowledge from a firehose there. The information will come at you fast and furious. As an attendee, you will get all the session videos on ADC on iTunes. It used to take some time before the videos were available, but hopefully they'll continue to get them out quickly. Even so, make sure you write down the information you need immediately.

Collaborative note taking A few years ago, people started taking communal notes using SubEthaEdit and Panic's Coda (they are compatible with each other). That worked out really, really well. My notes from the past few years are ten times better than from previous years. With SubEthaEdit, you don't have to type fast enough to catch every detail. Instead, the audience works as a team and everybody gets great notes. The license fee pays for itself in one WWDC, especially considering you can see notes being taken in other sessions, not just your own.

Labs rule. If you're having a problem, find an appropriate lab. One of the concierges at any of the labs can tell you exactly which teams and/or which Apple employees will be at which labs when. If you're having an audio problem, you can easily stalk the Core Audio team until they beat the information into your skull, for example. It's unstructured, hands-on time with the people who write the frameworks and applications we use every day. People start remembering the labs later in the week it seems, but early on, you can often get an engineer all to yourself, though people have started to catch on. Every year the labs fill up earlier in the week.

Buddy up, divide and conquer There will be at least a few times when you want to be at more than one presentation at the same time. Find someone who's attending one and go to the other (Twitter is a good way to find people), then share your notes.

Make sure to sleep on the plane. You won't get many other chances once you get there. Everybody is ragged by Friday, some of us even earlier. Everyone remains surprisingly polite given how sleep-deprived and/or hungover people are.

Thank your hosts. The folks at Apple - the engineers and evangelists who give the presentations and staff the labs, kill themselves for months to make WWDC such a great event. So, do your mother proud and remember your manners. Say thank you when someone helps you, or even if they try and don't. And if you see one of them at an after hours event, it's quite alright to buy them a beer to say thanks.

Remember you're under NDA. This one is hard, especially for me. We see so much exciting amazing stuff that week that it's natural to want to tweet it, blog it, or even tell the guy handing out advertisements for strip joints on the corner all about it. Don't. Everything, from morning to night except the Keynote and the Thursday night party are under NDA.

Brown Bag it. Most days there are "brown bag" sessions. These are speakers not from Apple who give entertaining, enlightening, or inspiring talks at lunchtime. Check the schedule, some of them are bound to be well worth your time.

Monday, Monday I don't know what to say about Monday. The last few years, people started lining up before midnight the night before. I'm typically on East coast time and usually walk over around 4:15 to see what's going on. I've done the line, and I've done the have-a-leisurely-breakfast route, and both have their merits. If you straggle too much, they may start before you get in the room, however (happened to me two years ago).

Waiting in line is not really my thing, but you do get to talk to a lot of very cool people while waiting in line, and there is a sense of camaraderie that develops when you do something silly with other people like that. Some people probably want me to suggest what time to get in line. I have no idea. Most people will get into the main room to see the Keynote. There will be some people diverted to an overflow room, but because the number of attendees is relatively low and the Presidio (the keynote room) is so big, it's a tiny percentage who have to go to the overflow rooms (maybe the last 1,000 to 1,500 or so, depending on number of VIPs in attendance). On the other hand, you'll actually get a better view in the overflow rooms unless you get in line crazy early - you'll get to watch it in real time on huge screens and you'll get to see what's happening better than the people at the back of the Presidio. So, go when you want to. If you want to get up early and go be one of the "crazy ones", cool! If you want to get up later, you'll still get to see the keynote sitting in a comfy room with other geeks.

Turn off your MiFi/Clear/other wireless router. I'm so totally not kidding on this one. People will punch you if they find out you've got one on. Last year, so many people had MiFis and other mobile hotspots running during the keynote that it interfered with the conference center's (very good) WiFi network and disrupted some of the tech demos. Once you're in the building, you don't need it. They have crazy fast pipe in the building, so just use the provided WiFi and turn your wireless router off. Seriously.

Park it once in a while There will be time between sessions, and maybe even one or two slots that have nothing you're interested in. Or, you might find yourself just too tired to take in the inner workings of some technology. In that case, there are several lounges around where you can crash in a bean bag chair, comfy chair, moderately-comfy chair, or patch of floor. There is good wi-fi throughout the building and crazy-fast wired connections and outlets in various spots on all floors. So, find a spot, tweet your location, and zone out for a little while or do some coding. You never know who you might end up talking with. If you move around too much, well, let's just say a moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one.

Twitter is invaluable, but don't expect it to stay up during the keynote. There's really no better way to hook up with people you didn't travel with than Twitter. Two years ago, we completely overwhelmed twitter during the keynote. Last year it fared okay, though there were some delays and hiccups.

It's okay to leave. Don't worry if a few minutes into a session you decide that you've made a horrible mistake and it's too boring/advanced/simple/etc, or you're just too hungover. Just get up and leave quietly and wander to a different session. Nobody is going to be offended if you leave politely and without causing a disturbance.

Bring proof of age on Thursday night. The official party is always on Thursday night, and it's always a blast. There's good food, good drink, great company, and usually a pretty good band. The last three years featured OK, Go, Cake, and the Bare Naked Ladies. They are pretty strict about making sure only people who are over 21 get alcohol. So, if you want to have a drink or five on Thursday, don't leave your license or passport in your hotel room, even if you're 70 years old.

It's okay to take breaks. Your first time, you're going to be tempted to go to every session you possibly can. Somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday, though, that effort combined with lack of sleep, is going to take its toll on you. If you're too tired or overwhelmed to process information, it's okay to hole up on a couch or at a table instead of going to a session, or even to go back to your hotel (you did get a close one, right?). In fact, it's a darn good idea to map out a few "sacrificial" time slots that won't feel bad about missing just in case you need a break. You don't want to burn out and then miss something you are really interested in. And some of the best, more advanced sessions fall at the end of the week, so don't shoot your wad early in the week.

Get a close hotel If at all possible, try and get a hotel within two blocks and definitely not more than five blocks from Moscone West. Five blocks doesn't seem like a lot, but it can become quite a hassle, especially if you're North of Moscone West because you'll be climbing up a pretty decent hill in one direction.

Official Evening Events In addition to the Thursday night Beer Bash, there are other official activities in the evening that are very entertaining and usually happen in the early evening before the parties really get going. The two stalwarts are the Apple Design Awards and Stump the Chumps (it's actually called "Stump the Experts", but most of the participants refer to it as "Stump the Chumps"). Stump the Experts is an Apple trivia game-show like event with notable tech luminaries and former Apple employees. Lots of sharp wits and deep knowledge of Apple make for some good entertainment. There used to also be a Monday night reception and cocktail hour, but if memory serves, it hasn't happened in a few years.

Take the BART If you're flying into either SFO or OAK and are staying near Moscone West (or near any BART station) there's really no reason to bother with renting a car or taking a cab from the airport. Just take BART and get off at the Powell Street station and walk up 4th street (South). Moscone West will be about four blocks on your right.

Bring a Sweatshirt or Jacket A lot of first-timers assume that it's California in the summer so it's going to be hot. Well, it could be, during the middle of the day, but look up Mark Twain's quote about San Francisco in the summer. It can be downright cool in San Francisco in the summer time, especially in the evenings and early morning. Bring a sweatshirt or light jacket, and wear layers because the temperature differential over the course of the day can be forty or fifty degrees.

Sample Code Many sessions will have sample code, usually downloadable from the schedule or class descriptions web pages. The sample code will stay up for a while, but may not stay around forever, so it's a good idea to download any code samples you want as soon as you can. Edit: It looks like starting with 2009, you can get to the old source code for years you attended by logging in to ADC on iTunes, however I always save off a copy just in case.

Get a Battery Pack You might want to consider a battery pack for your iPhone. You'll be in for some very long days, and it's not uncommon for your phone to be bone dry by early evening if you don't remember to charge it during the day. AT&T reception in San Francisco is notoriously bad, and that takes a toll on battery life.

Don't Sound Like a N00b It's technically called the "World Wide Developer's Conference", so logically, you'd expect people to refer to it as "the WWDC" (e.g. "I'm going to head over to the WWDC")… only nobody does. It's just "WWDC" ("are you gong to WWDC this year?). Less commonly, it's also called the "Dubdub", with or without the "the": ("Man, what an awesome Dubdub that was", or "What time are you heading over to the Dubdub?").

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Ten months ago when the original iPad shipped, Apple released iOS 3.2, and for the first time, iOS developers had access to NSAttributedString and NSMutableAttributedString, objects designed to hold strings along with font, paragraph, and style information. We no longer had to resort to using heavy UIWebViews or complex Core Graphics calls to draw styled text.

Well, sort of…

On the Mac side of things, NSAttributedString and its counterpart NSMutableAttributedString have been around for a long, long time, as part of Foundation. But, there's also been, for nearly as long, categories on both of these classes in App Kit called the Application Kit Additions which have all sorts of useful additional methods.

These categories provide ways to create attributed strings from various sorts of formatted text documents (RTF, HTML), to create attributed strings by specifying multiple specified attributes, to tweak existing attributes, to draw the attributed string, and to determine the size of an attributed string if it were to be drawn.

In fact, most of the really useful methods for these two classes are contained in these App Kit categories and not in the base classes. Unfortunately, we don't have those categories in the iOS SDK, or even a scaled back version of them. We just have the base classes. That means we have a whopping thirteen methods on NSAttributedString, and another thirteen on NSMutableAttributedString.

Even weirder, NSAttributedString has an init method that takes a dictionary of string attributes, but the key constants for using that method aren't even included in iOS in either the public headers or the documentation. The description of the methods that take these attributes state that the constants are in the Overview section of the documentation, but that's actually only true in the Mac OS X documentation, not the iOS documentation.

In other words, you can't create an NSAttributedString or NSMutableAttributedString using initWithString:attributes: because you don't have the constants you need in order to specify the various attributes. That's not entirely true; you actually are able to use the Core Text counterparts of the NSAttributedString constants , such as kCTForegroundColorAttributeName in place of NSForegroundColorAttributeName, however this isn't actually documented anywhere, and there isn't an exact 1:1 correlation between the NS and CT string attributes (though it's close).

This situation is really odd. Apple went through great efforts to give us all the low-level pieces need to do complex text rendering, but didn't give us higher-level objects to handle most that functionality elegantly. We have the lion's share of all of the low-level Core Text and Core Graphics calls that are available on Mac OS X (still no Core Image, though). Yet, we have to write low-level Core Text and Core Graphics code to do the bulk of even the most common typesetting tasks using attributed strings.

Fortunately, NSAttributedString and NSMutableAttributedString are both toll-free bridged to their Core Foundation counterparts CFAttributedStringRef and CFMutableAttributedStringRef respectively. That means you can create, for example, a CFAttributedStringRef and simply cast it to an NSAttributedString pointer, and then calling NSAttributedString methods on it will work.

Mostly.

There's one gotcha here. On iOS, UIFont and CTFont are not toll-free bridged, even though NSFont and CTFont on the Mac are. You cannot pass a UIFont into a function that expects a CTFont and vice versa.

Notice the name of this method - the word "create" in the function name indicates that the returned CTFont object has been retained for you, and you are responsible for calling CFRelease() on it when you're done with it, to avoid leaking.

Going the other way, from a CTFont to a UIFont is only a little more involved. Here's a category method on UIFont that will create an instance of UIFont based on a CTFontRef pointer

Once you have the ability to convert the two font objects into each other, creating attributed strings really isn't that bad. Here's an example category method on NSMutableAttributedString that will create an instance by taking an NSString plus a font, a font size, and a constant representing the desired text justification. It will return an autoreleased attributed string with the text attributes applied to the entire string:

What about calculating the space needed to draw an attributable string? That's a little more involved, but it can be done. Here are two category methods on NSAttributedStringthat will tell you how much space an attributed string will require when drawn at a specified width or height, which is a useful thing to know when laying out text:

NB(1): This is a new version that's both shorter, and fixes a bug with the original version.

NB(2): A couple of people on Twitter have commented that you should save a reference to your CTFrameSetterRef when calculating height or width and re-use it, because the framesetter will cache those calculations. If you use a new one, you not only have the overhead of a new object, you will also be doing the size calculation twice. I'm planning a future post where I show how to draw attributed strings, and I need to give some thought about how to re-architect the code for that post based on that feedback.

I assume it's only a matter of time before Apple gives us the NSAttributedStringUIKit Additions category, or some similar higher-level functionality. In the meantime, any time you have to deal with attributed strings, the best bet is to figure out how to do what you need to do in Core Text and/or Core Graphics (Apple's Programming Guides actually show exactly how to do the most common tasks using both of these frameworks), then wrap a generic version of that code into a category method on NSAttributedString or NSMutableAttributableString.

If you have any thought of making the jump from iOS to the Mac App Store, bookmark this post by Craig Hockenberry right now. It's a brilliant and detailed guide to everything you need to do to get your application on the Mac App Store from somebody who's been there.

Friday, March 4, 2011

MartianCraft has a fair amount of Android work right now. Personally, I try to focus on the iOS work whenever possible, but we're a small company, so nobody gets to play the primadonna. As a result, I spend a good chunk of my time on Android projects and have to stay abreast of both the Android and iOS worlds from both a hardware and a software perspective.

Last week, I found myself grudgingly admitting to myself that the Motorola Xoom is not a bad tablet. It feels incomplete in many ways. It has rough edges, some definite hardware and software CBBs¹, and a general dearth of good, native-resolution apps. But, it had potential and I definitely saw how certain demographics might be attracted to it over the iPad. I saw a tablet that normal people could use with some frustration, but not an insurmountable amount… much like Windows, post Windows-95.

The thing that I haven't seen in any of the Android tablets, however, is a compelling reason to buy them instead of the iPad. The only people I know who've bought Android tablets also own iPads. Other than a strong aversion to Apple's products or Apple as a company, what would compel somebody to pay $800 for a Xoom or Tab rather than going out and getting an iPad? Maybe there's a reason, but I can't see it. While both the Xoom and Tab had some specs that were better than the original iPad, neither offered a comparable experience let alone a better one, and neither could do anything that the iPad can't², despite higher price tags.

Then came yesterday.

Two days ago, the Xoom looked like a decent, almost finished and slightly overpriced tablet. Two days ago, it had a couple of quantifiable advantages, including native CDMA support and a better GPU. Two days ago, you could make the Xoom look better than the iPad on paper. Though marketing based on tech specs hasn't proven to be a very effective strategy in mobile computing space, at least they did have that for them. They had grounds for claiming you should buy the Xoom instead of an iPad. The arguments were thin, but two days ago they existed.

Today, simply put: The Xoom is fucked. So, I suspect, is the unreleased Samsung Tab 10.1 and the RIM Playbook. I can only imagine the discussions that are going on inside those companies today.

Only the staunchest Apple haters and self-deluded "openness" ideologues are going to pony up that kind of dough for a tablet that can't offer a comparable experience and doesn't have better tech specs. The Xoom doesn't even have the advantage of working with a carrier that Apple's tablet doesn't. In seven days, there will be both native CDMA and GSM models of the iPad 2.

Think about this: yesterday when I checked, the Android Marketplace had sixteen Honeycomb tablet-resolution apps. Sixteen. And you know what's not included in that sixteen? That space game that they show the guy playing in the Xoom commercials. In other words, they had to put a fake game in the commercial. Would they have done that if they had even one compelling application that could make the Xoom look better than the iPad?

As a tablet platform, Android has two big challenges.

First, it has a chicken-and-egg problem with software. Developers are waiting for people to buy Android tablets in sufficient quantity to support the platform, and many consumers are waiting for good apps to buy Android. In the phone world, Android seems to be past that hump. While the app situation is nowhere near as good as on iOS yet, there are apps — including some good ones — for the platform.

But, even if the Xoom were every bit as amazing of a piece of hardware as the iPad 2, it would still have the problem that it does less cool things. There's nothing comparable to Garage Band or iMovies, or any of the hundreds of jaw-dropping iPad apps that have been created in the last year like Infinity Blade, The Elements, or Alice. There's just no "wow" app you can put on your Xoom and show people that's going to make them want to run out and buy one. There's nothing you can do and confidently say "your iPad can't do that shit right there, bitch".

The second, and much larger problem is simply one of price. I see people constantly comparing the Android/iOS situation to the Windows/Mac situation of the eighties and nineties. I usually see this claim by people laughably arguing that Apple's failure is imminent.

In the nineties, Apple kept insane profit margins on their products while dozens of manufacturers created inexpensive commodity PCs running Windows. There was a margin war on the PC side, and PCs became noticeably cheaper (despite paying hefty licensing fees to Microsoft), and that price difference, combined with Microsoft closing some of the usability gap with the Mac, is what lead to the dominance of Wintel machines. In the nineties, Macs simply cost more. You could argue that Macs were cheaper based on TOC or employee efficiency, but in the quantifiable terms that bean counters understand, the Mac was a lot more expensive and didn't do noticeably more, especially once Adobe jumped ship and become cross-platform.

That's not where things are now, however. For typical consumers - people who don't have a dog in the technology race, so to speak, are going to buy based largely on price, Apple's mobile "post-PC devices" aren't just better than their competitors, they're cheaper than comparable competitors.

We don't have a situation where commodity resellers can easily assemble components into a working, desirable mobile device. Mobile devices are all about form factor, design, and ease of use. They don't sit on a desk, they go where you go. They need to be well engineered, light, get good battery life, and be easy to use. They can't require IT support staff, an instruction manual, or training. A large beige box on a desk is one thing, but in your pocket it's another thing altogether.

Why is this the case, though? Why can't these companies compete with Apple on price in the tablet space?

The prices Apple can offer is a result of two things. First, is plain and simple buying power. Apple sells a lot of devices, so they buy a lot of screens, flash memory, etc. As a result, they can get quantity discounts. Apple got to the 10 inch form factor first and cornered the market, driving up the price for 10" screen components for any competitors coming after them.

The second, however, is that they have gobs of cash on hand. A lot of market watchers say Apple is foolhardy to keep so much cash on hand. On the contrary! Apple understands psychology, and not just consumer psychology. When they go to a vendor or hardware partner and ask for exclusive arrangements, priority fulfillment, or better prices, do you know what bargaining chip they have that few other companies have?

The corporate equivalent of a suitcase full of cash.

When a vendor needs to retool for a new manufacturing process Apple has developed or needs to increase their output capacity, Apple shows up with a wad of cash in hand. They don't have to liquidate any assets or get a loan or seek permission of shareholders. They just play Daddy Warbucks and pull out a wad of million dollar bills. Apple's partners, in addition to getting large-volume contracts, can get working capital as part of their arrangment with Apple without taking out loans. A definite part of the reason you were able to buy an iPad for only $499 is because Apple didn't follow conventional wisdom about cash on hand.

Arguing that Apple would be doing better by doing what everybody else is doing isn't usually very convincing to me.

Motorola and Samsung… they're both large companies with a lot of buying power and strong brand recognition. The problem is, they don't understand the game that Apple's playing in the mobile space, so they're playing it wrong. They're so caught up in catching up that they're not even trying to innovate in this space. Maybe HP or Rim will figure it out, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Which is unfortunate. If Apple's doing this kind of amazing stuff without any viable competition, can you imagine what they'd be doing with strong, viable competitors nipping at their heels?

1 "Could Be Betters"2 From a consumer perspective, not from the perspective of a geek who likes to take things apart and put them back together. The Xoom, with its more powerful processor and GPU had the potential to do things the original iPad couldn't, but didn't ship with any application that proved it. Consumers believe what they see, not what the tech specs say.

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About Me

I'm a programmer, author, and one of the founders of MartianCraft, a software development shop doing both contract and in-house software development.
My iPhone books (both written with Dave Mark) are published by Apress. My first book, Beginning iPhone Development (currently in its 6th edition) is the all-time best-selling book on learning to program the iPhone and iPad.
I also sculpt and take pictures when I need to engage the other side of my brain a little more.